At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We read little of unselfish feeling and innocent sympathies, much of self-interested calculation, on the part of women as well as of men, nay, especially on the part of women; even in love, and still more when it is only a substitute for love which is described. In many of these novels the courtesan thrusts the fine lady into the background, and occasionally the former is represented as more disinterested than the latter. Abysses of selfishness and vice open before the reader's eyes.
[1] _Cf_. Th. Gautier, _Portraits contemporains_, p. 108.
[2] See _Le Message, La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, La grande Brétèche, Madame Firmiani, Une Fille d'Eve_, and _La Femme de trente Ans_, which last work is a collection of stories not originally written in connection with each other.
Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially deserving of notice--the delicately wrought, classic tale, _Eugénie Grandet_, and the powerful, fateful _Père Goriot_. In the first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (_l'Avare_) in the second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (_King Lear_).
_Eugénie Grandet_ does not represent the full measure of Balzac's talent, though he long went by the name of its author as a kind of title of honour. The book interested because of its careful and accurate descriptions of provincial life with its virtues and vices; it could be recommended for family reading, because the heroine was a chaste and noble-minded young girl; but its chief distinction lay in the wonderful manner in which Balzac's genius makes of covetousness and avarice, qualities of which hitherto only the comical side had been displayed, imposing vices. He shows how the instinct of amassing money, which it is the custom to regard as a laughable weakness, by degrees stifles every human feeling, and, raising its terrible Medusa head, tyrannises over the miser's surroundings; and he at the same time makes the miser himself a more human figure. To Balzac he is not the stereotyped comedy bourgeois, but a power-loving monomaniac, a petrified enthusiast, a poet, who at the sight of his gold revels in satisfied desire, but also in wild dreams. The miser is simply a man who is more thoroughly impressed than other men with the truth that money represents all human powers and pleasures. In the representation of such a character, Balzac displays his peculiar gift, which is that of producing a powerful effect with small means, with what others have overlooked or despised. From the symbolic standpoint the horizon of _Eugénie Grandet_ is not narrow; but it was narrow in comparison with Balzac's characteristic and usual one.